There’s a question every writer hears sooner or later: “Do you have a plan?” A client comes to a writer and asks whether they can be given a plan for the book they want commissioned.
In general terms, the writer answers — but rarely with the kind of concrete detail the client is hoping for.
Plan as Guarantee or Plan as Cage?
How bad is that, really? Hard to say. On one hand, a professional should understand the algorithm by which the work will unfold. On the other — every client wants a unique book written for them, one unlike any other, just as they are unlike anyone else. That’s a fairly typical wish when someone comes to a writer hoping to create something.
Creativity vs. Structure
From my own experience, I can tell you: the unconventional and the planned belong to different worlds. The first is born out of creative surprise. The second comes out of the working brain.
When the Plan Finally Has a Place
You can reconcile them, but only at the second stage — once everything is written and being assembled into a whole. It’s simply impossible to do it at the stage when nothing has even started being written. More than that — when you give creativity real freedom, you get far more chances to create something extraordinary, something genuinely striking. Which is to say, a unique book. But there’s a catch: you have to understand that this is a journey into the unknown. Nothing and no one out there is going to follow a plan, no matter how brilliant that plan might be.
The Creative Flow — Like Driving Through the Night
I’ll go further: when a writer is carried by the creative flow, they often don’t know what they’ll be writing five minutes from now. The state is very similar to a person tearing down an unfamiliar road at incredible speed. The car’s headlights light up only a few meters ahead — but they do it brilliantly, showing in fine detail what was completely invisible just a moment before. And what awaits the writer beyond the edge of that light is entirely unknown.
The Plan Comes After the Chaos
There’s no plan here, no sequence. This is a state that doesn’t permit any algorithm. But all of that will appear in the book later, once the writer surfaces from the unknown and begins, like a craftsman sewing a pair of boots, to stitch everything together — turning the text into something whole, logical, and right.
A Plan for What’s Already Written
This is where the plan finally has its place. The plan by which an already-written book will be written.
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